Are Humans Worse than Chernobyl?

Nearly thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the region's animal population is thriving. Whatever the effect of radiation, the effects of human habitation seem to have been a lot more damaging to nature than one of the twentieth century’s worst environmental catastrophes.

PORTSMOUTH – Nearly 30 years have passed since the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, and the scientific community is still arguing about the impact radiation is having on the ecosystem surrounding the reactor. Recently, together with other scientists, I studied the animals in the human exclusion zone around the plant.

The results were shocking: whatever the impact of radiation on animals may be, the effects of human habitation seem to have been a lot worse. The site offers a stark reminder that humans’ simple, physical presence in a habitat is more damaging than one of the twentieth century’s worst environmental catastrophes.

We studied animals in the nearly 2,200-square-kilometer (850 square miles) sector of the exclusion zone in Belarus called the “Polessye State Radioecological Reserve.” Before the disaster, this area was home to 22,000 people in 92 villages, and the land was farmed and exploited for its forest resources. In the days after the accident, the area’s human residents were evacuated with their farm animals to protect them from high levels of radiation.

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Fish stocks around the UK were in steady decline leading up to WW2. During that war fishing bruptly dropped, fish stocks rapidly recovered over 5 years and were healthy at the end of the war. Since then they have done nothing but decline to the current crisis levels. Much the same story

Space to grow food is not the issue - it is the demand for meat - if people eat a mainly vegetarian diet they will live longer, get less cancer, diabetes and heart attacks, and we can grow the food we need on 10% of the space needed for meat based diets.

A governmental organization owns it to the citizen to whom it ask support, to be frank, honest and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of there limited resources. For a successful society/organisation reality must take precedence over public relation, for nature cannot be fooled.

In 2013 we went to the German technical museum in Munich, where a notice board was exposed. It say's on the notice board Economic growth and our current lifestyle are linked to high energy consumption. Every German produces an average of circa 11t of CO2 every year. To meet emission targets, this amount must be drastically reduced.
This suggests somehow, that the reduction of the CO2 footprint of a person will solve climate problems. Can a complex system like the earth atmosphere really be controlled by a single parameter?
Let's make the assumption that the earth is a non-linear oscillating system. Such a system shows a stable oscillating motion only for a limited energy band. If too much energy is applied to an non-linear oscillating system, the motion of the system becomes chaotic. It should be clear that chaotic, unstable weather patterns have a disastrous effects on our society.
Let us make the assumption that we reduce our lifestyle to an average CO2 consumption of approximately 0,1t per person per year; which corresponds to the current CO2 consumption of countries like Madagascar.
However, the carbon dioxide emission of a country are only an indicator of one greenhouse gas. For a more complete idea of how much a country influences climate changes, gases like methane and nitrous oxide should be taken into account. This is particularly so in agricultural economics.
Thus let us assume that the other greenhouse gases are reduced accordingly. Would that help?
Well - assume an exponential growth rate according to the formula

p(year)/p(2010) = A exp(alpha(year-2010))/p(2010)

where p(year) denotes the world population for a particular year after 2010. The constant alpha was computed from the forecast of the world population in 2015 (9624 Million) and the coefficient A is the world population in 2010 (7000 Million); see e.g. World population in the Wikipedia. The constant alpha should actually vary in time and is not a constant as assumed here; e.g. between 1965 and 1970 was the world population growing at about 2.1% per year. Never before in the 20th century was the population growth so large. Today the world population growth is only about 1,1% or 1,2% per year. The sharp decline may be related to the decision of billions of couples to have none or only one or two children. Anyhow, the exact value of alpha is not significant for the argumentation, as long as alpha is a positive number. The assumption that the world population growth is governed by an exponential law may be reasonable, but may not be valid for particular growth periods related to catastrophic events.
Even if we decrease the carbon footprint of a person approximately by 1/100 of the current CO2 footprint of a person in Germany, results a continuing exponential growth of the word population sooner or later to an carbon/climate gas concentration which crosses any threshold for a stable climate. The energy added to the atmosphere becomes sooner or later so large, that the climate becomes unstable. Imagine a marathon runner who does not sweat enough, sooner or later he will collapse.
Even if each person on this plant would only have a carbon footprint of 0,1t per year, the global carbon concentration in the atmosphere would double in the next 100 years. Using linear interpolation (which I think is not correct and underestimates the population growth) an extrapolation of the UNDESA population estimates say that the world population will double by 2025; again see World population.

Thus all what the reduction of greenhouses gases does is to buy us some time. But it does not solve the fundamental problem of the global continuing increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Currently I have no idea where the threshold for a stable climate should be. A theory of non-linear oscillating systems needs to be worked out in more detail before it can actually be applied to the earth ecosystem. Thus these considerations here may currently be regarded as pure speculations. However, if the world population continues to grow at a high rate and the devastation of the earth ecological system continues, then we sooner or later cross a critical threshold - probably without notice.

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